Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.
The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.
Server farms tend to have huge footprints, so putting them in urban areas where land prices are high, is prohibitively expensive - so they won’t do it.
There’s probably an industrial setting that’s in need of hot water? I feel like this is a solvable problem.